Essential Practice #2
Providing a School Culture and Climate Conducive to Learning
Another early and continuing priority is to assure students of an environment that is orderly, clean, and safe, and most of all, that high expectations for student learning are the norm. This begins with the principal, but all staff play a role in remodeling expectations and behavior. The process emphasizes such mundane but essential details as taking attendance, reporting and following up on absences or truancies, securing school entrances, starting classes on time, heading off unsupervised traffic in hallways, and the like. The specialists work with leadership to raise standards of climate and culture in every aspect from management to instruction. Introducing such disciplines at the start of the school year can have an immediate, perceptible effect on the atmosphere of the school.
The emphasis on reading and individual goal-setting helps students play their own roles in improving culture. When each student has a self-selected book at appropriate reading level, there is something positive to do between activities and much less inclination toward unproductive or disruptive activities. And setting clear, attainable goals for all students gives them responsibility for their own learning that makes them active participants in a community of learners, not passive recipients.
Adults join this community of learning through an emphasis on shared goals, monitoring outcomes, and participative planning of needed changes, driven by the transparent reporting tool of ILeRT and frequent instructional conversations. Parents, too, join the culture of learning through access to reports on their children via Renaissance Home Connect, secure web access to student progress indicators. Even in communities where personal computer ownership may be low, the web tools can be accessed through any web-connected computer at places such as libraries or community centers. Low-pressure but motivating events such as Family Reading Nights are also used to stimulate parental involvement.
